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The Pirate Bay Appeal Day 3: The Wasa Connection

The Pirate Bay appeal continued this morning with the defense of Carl Lundström. His lawyer argued that his client is not the major financier behind The Pirate Bay as the prosecution would have the court believe. Lundström – the grandson of the founder of the Wasa knäckebröd company – was never involved with The Pirate Bay, his lawyer claimed.

Friday, the third day of the appeal, is largely being devoted to the defense of 50-year-old Carl Lundström. His lawyer, Per E Samuelson, started off by explaining the background of his client, who is a well-known businessman in Sweden.

Lundström is the grandson of Karl Edvard Lundström who founded the famous Wasabröd company in 1919. Carl Lundström inherited a large sum of money from his father who died in 1973.

He started several companies, including Rix Telecom (Port 80) which sold colocation space and bandwidth to The Pirate Bay’s former hosting company PRQ.

Lawyer Per E Samuelson refuted claims from the prosecution that his client was actively involved in financing the Pirate Bay. In the fall of 2004, Carl Lundström met with Fredrik Neij at Dreamhack, who introduced him to the The Pirate Bay website, the lawyer said. This was after the website was founded.

Lundström later hired Neij as an employee for Rix Telecom in Gothenburg, the lawyer explained. The two made a deal to cut the wage of Neij in half in exchange for rack-space in the Rix Telecom datacenter where The Pirate Bay’s servers were placed. According to the defense, there was a verbal agreement that The Pirate Bay would eventually pay for itself.

In the hour that followed, Lundström’s lawyer disconnected his client even further from The Pirate Bay. Among other things, he presented an agreement between the three other defendants, an Israeli businessman and an advertising company. The agreement related to The Pirate Bay’s operation but didn’t include Lundström.

The rest of the morning was spent discussing Lundström’s (dis)connection to The Pirate Bay. No mention was made about the legality of the site itself or any of the crimes that the defendants are charged with.

The Appeal Court announced a lunch break at 11:45. After the lunch a video of the interrogations of defendant Gottfrid Svartholm at the District Court was played. The appeal will not question any of the defendants during the appeal, except from some additional questions to Fredrik Neij who was not present today due to illness.

During the interview the prosecution emphasized the financial issues, and specifically the link with the Israeli businessman who handles the ads. When asked if Gottfrid was in charge of ad sales he answered: “No, I tried to get away from that because of time issues. I had a business to run before you came and took it all away.”

The prosecution further questioned Gottfrid about moderation issues, replies to copyright holders and his involvement in developing the site. The prosecutor pushed hard on whether Peter Sunde had worked on the layout and graphics for the site. “To my knowledge, he is neither designer nor graphic artist,” Gottfried replied.

Movie industry lawyer Monique Wadsted later asked Gottfrid how they handle torrents that (allegedly) link to child porn. He said that in such a case they would inform the police.

She then asked if they removed those torrents. He said “some”. “Not all?” was Wadsted’s reply. Gottfrid explained that it is not up to them to investigate crimes, but that they do inform the police. “We can’t do investigations of our own. And if the police say we should remove a torrent, we will,” he said.

When asked about the revenue The Pirate Bay made Gottfrid said that the figure of 1.2 million Swedish Krona that the prosecution estimated could be right, but that would be before any bills were paid.

Gottfrid further said that Peter Sunde has nothing to do with technical administration, design, layout, ad sales or any hands-on stuff with the site. He’s just been a spokesperson for The Pirate Bay. “Neither me or Neij work well in furnished rooms. Peter was better on the verbal issues and media,” he said.